The Nickel and Dimed author presents her latest polemic

Has a native strain of compulsory optimism sold America down the river—perhaps even sent us around the bend? This deeply disquieting thought fuels Bright-sided (Metropolitan Books), the latest polemic by lefty gadfly Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the runaway best-seller about the working poor Nickel and Dimed (2001).

Bright-sided traces positive-thinking ideology from the nineteenth-century Christian Science movement (to which the author's own great-grandmother was a convert) through Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale to today's prosperity-gospel preachers such as Joel Osteen, the academic "positive psychology" movement led by Martin Seligman, the charismatic cults of corporate America promoted by the likes of Jack Welch, Tom Peters, and Tony Robbins, and, ultimately, to the irrational exuberance underlying last year's epic financial and real estate meltdown. While Ehrenreich deftly picks apart some studies purporting to show that positive thinking can help fight illness and improve health (she holds a PhD in cellular immunology), she chiefly relies on her abundant common sense to construct her wide-ranging and often devastating account of "how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America."

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On an idyllic summer afternoon at an outdoor Italian restaurant near the Potomac riverfront and not far from her home in Alexandria, Virginia, Ehrenreich and I darkly plotted and fulminated against the likes of the publishing megahit The Secret, which counsels that if you clap your hands and say you do believe in fairies, you do, you do, then down will rain pennies from heaven.

Evidently, you've been saving string for this book over many years. How and when did you conceive of writing a full-on critique of the ideology of positive thinking?
My first real encounter with it was when I was being treated for breast cancer. I just couldn't understand this message that was being beamed at me from so many sources about being upbeat and positive and embracing your cancer, thinking of it as a gift. It drove me crazy. A few years later, researching a book called Bait and Switch, there it was again, now being told to people who are laid off—another great crisis in their lives: Change your attitude and everything will be okay. It began slowly to dawn on me that this was something everybody else knew but I didn't, because I'm a freelance writer. I work alone, so I have no workplace where I'm going to be subjected to a motivational speaker. I don't go to a church, and in many of the evangelical churches, their line right now is positive thinking. As I began searching around and noticing it, the message was everywhere: Any problem you have, just change your attitude or visualize what you want and it will come to you.

It's interesting that women such as Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy were at the forefront of the New Thought movement, to which you trace the roots of positive thinking, and that its rejection of dour, fire-and-brimstone Calvinist faith has been likened to a feminization of religion and culture. Is there a special relationship between women and positive thinking?
No, I think what happened is that nineteenth-century middle-class women were suffering from neurasthenia, in which a woman would fall into all sorts of complaints—indigestion, lower back pain—things that you can imagine had a psychosomatic component. It was sort of an epidemic. Many very talented women spent months or years of their lives in a state of invalidism. Then New Thought came along, and I give most of the credit to a man here, the amazing Phineas Parker Quimby, who had the idea that the belief that everyone was a sinner and probably damned from birth was what was actually making people sick. If you could just change your mind, you wouldn't be so sick. Mary Baker Eddy was an invalid for years who had the misfortune of not having a husband to support her in that particular line of activity, or inactivity. She liked to read a lot, and she wrote for newspapers. But she was always in some sort of pain. And then she went to Quimby and was miraculously cured. She then became the great publicist for this mind cure.

Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images (left); Sigrid Estrada (right)

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Moving to modern times, does the basic doctrine of positive thinking hold special perils for American women as opposed to men?
Well I don't know about perils, but I think there's probably more pressure on women to always evince a positive affect and smile, because that's the sex role—that's your job, and in the dating market, women are told you're not going to get far if you're sarcastic or hypercritical or argumentative or any of those kinds of things. There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.

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It's striking how positive thinking reinforces conformity and acceptance of what is and a self-monitoring obedience to it. So maybe women in their role as more subservient and agreeable may be more constrained by positive thinking as a doctrine.
Yeah, it has to be, because if you think of what's sexy in men, the sullen, scowling guy can be sexy as opposed to a genial guy for some reason. Whereas I think that doesn't work so well for women. I've been told all my life, "What's the matter honey, it's not that bad, how about a little smile?" I mean, all women are.

I don't know if you noticed, but in the science section of the Washington Post recently there was a short report about psychology experiments which determined that repeating positive statements apparently does not help people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves. In fact, it tends to make them feel worse.
Oh, no! You've got to send me the source on that. Making you feel better is the one thing you think it would do if you said over and over, "I am wonderful, I am beautiful and brilliant," et cetera, "I'm a lovable person." (chuckles) But no!

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Do you recognize that dynamic from your own investigations into positive thinking—that it doesn't always help?
I'm a little bit surprised because I thought you could possibly use self-help and self-hypnosis to make yourself feel better about yourself, so it's worse than I thought. I was busy refuting the claim that it makes you healthier.

Maybe it has something to do with cognitive dissonance, that you can only BS yourself to a certain degree, or you really know you're just spouting nonsense.
Well, I should think just the effort would be draining. You and I probably are not monitoring our minds at all times for little negative thoughts. I think that the effort of monitoring is a weight and a burden.

Psychological pressure.
In that way, it makes sense to me that it could be completely counterproductive.

But many people do subscribe to the notion that to some non-trivial degree, we are capable of making our own luck—that is, seizing the day, grasping at the main chance, not passing up those opportunities that we all sooner or later recognize and regret that we missed. Is there a kernel of truth, then, to the element of volition in positive thinking that doesn't involve magic thinking or self-delusion?
No question. Determination, energy, ambition, all these sorts of things play a big part in our lives. But when this gets turned into a total mind-over-matter notion of how the world operates, that's crazy. The trick is always trying to do as much as you can do, but then also realizing that there are a lot of forces lined up against you that have to be addressed in another way entirely. Maybe you need social change!

Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images (left); Sigrid Estrada (right)

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That's not thinking positively!
No, of course I recognize the importance of these subjective elements and what we're capable of doing.

And shrugging off the caution and timidity that life beats into us. Is there a useful distinction we can make, then, between positive and negative positive thinking, so to speak?
Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world. I know people like that, and they're a bummer.

It seems at times as if you're arraigning American culture as a whole for having a sweet tooth for positive thinking, but are there not certain subcultures or parts of our society that are more susceptible and more enthusiastic about it than others?
Yes, the corporate subculture, if you want to call it that. What really changed in the late twentieth century compared to say, the century before, is that it all got picked up by business and began to be more and more mandatory for people who work in corporate settings. Originally, it was the salespeople who had to be pumped up by positive thinking, and that almost makes sense to me. I know people in sales. But it became generalized through the corporation for people who don't even work with other people in the same way. The top people themselves came to believe that you could make anything happen by the power of thought—that's crazy! I would also include in the positive-thinking subculture so much Christian evangelism today, those who part sharply from traditional notions of Christianity about sin and redemption and all that and are just about God giving you good things, God giving you what you want.

Are there subgroups of the culture that you see as more resistant to positive thinking, or more simpatico or native to your own sensibility? Where do you see the pushback coming from?
I'm trying to start it (chuckles). I find when I talk to people about this stuff, they don't understand it in regard to the workplace and social control. If enough people start seeing it that way, it's news! I don't even see how it could have lasted this far into the recession. It just doesn't make sense to me. I feel like I should do some research right this minute because maybe it's a little different from last month, surely they're stopping all of this now.

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But in fact, as you point out, there's actually a desperate grasp for more of it.
Yes! Two weeks ago I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at a meeting where most of the people were about to be laid off from their jobs, and we went around the room and people told their stories. It was really very sad. A woman sitting next to me said that what's going to happen, as her unemployment insurance is about to run out, is that she'll live in her car—that's what's happening. Then we get to another woman who says, "Well, what we have to remember is that we have to be positive, and that means don't watch the news, don't read the newspaper, just concentrate." Oh my God, I ask, how could this be happening?

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Totalitarian. Even the victims endorse their position.
It's so much about how unattractive whiners are and complainers and how they should be shunned.

Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images (left); Sigrid Estrada (right)

First we cede patriotism to the cultural right, now we're ceding positivity to them. How many more hands can we tie behind our back, Barbara? To step back a minute from this whole issue, who have been the American thinkers who you particularly admire? I'll qualify that one of the things I find admirable about your whole approach is its nonindulgence in intellectual pedigrees and flirtations from the Great Books. When I found out you were working on this book about positive thinking, I sent you an e-mail about E.M. Cioran, the Romanian émigre who lived in Paris and wrote aphoristic books about despair and existential bleakness. Reading your book last month, I just laughed at myself because it was just not you to pick up a Gallic book of aphorisms and interpolate it into a book about American positive thinking. So I was just wondering, whom do you admire in the American tradition, and who are lodestars of your intellectual universe?
It's embarrassing, but I can't come up with anyone. Every book, every project introduces a new bunch of people who I find fascinating and learn a lot from.

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Maybe it's a function of your peculiar education, which is so science-based. You're not one of these humanities retreads who try to apply what they read before the age of 25 to everything for the rest of their lives.
I did want to work Camus into this book, and my editor wouldn't let me.

Get out of here! Are you kidding me?
Who else wrote against hope? I read that stuff as a teenager and it made a big impact on me. I had him in the last chapter, and my editor decided it was going off the deep end. She thought I should leave hope alone.

How do you feel about President Obama in relation to the themes in your new book?
All the hope stuff was a bit too much for me when he was running for president. Talk about content-free. I don't want hope; I want to know what you're going to do.

But you weren't a Hillary-ite either.
No, I supported—blush—John Edwards and then switched to Obama. Hillary was off my list for many policy-type reasons, going back to welfare reform and the complete f--kup of health reform. I like Obama. He's so smart, and he goes places and doesn't do embarrassing things. But like most people on the left, I'm not impressed by all the economic advice he's been getting.

He seems comfortable and conversant with all these upbeat discourses in religion and business and other spheres that you touch on in various chapters in your book. Do you worry about his sympathetic and ecumenical impulses?
About him lapsing into cheerfulness? Or surrendering to cheerfulness, as it were. Or letting it divert his agenda.
No, I think to get along with a lot of these powerful people you probably have to have spent a lot of time generating positivity, but he's not a cheerleader like Bush was. Bush had really no other conception of what it was to be president than to be the chief inspirer.

Are there any further dynamics we can draw out between positive thinking and the kind of winner-take-all, lotto-ticket social order we've shaped ourselves into beyond the way business has employed the doctrine to manipulate employees and sell mortgages?
Well, you don't worry about social inequality, for one thing, if you're a positive thinker, because you, too, can become rich just by modifying your thoughts. So why be concerned that some people are off in the stratosphere in their personal jets while you're waiting for the bus?

Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images (left); Sigrid Estrada (right)

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And if you're poor, you must not think right.
Yes, it's your own fault. It's an all-purpose buttress for conformity and acceptance of the status quo. In fact, most of the measures of quote-happiness-unquote that the positive psychologists offer are really about how much to accept the status quo. How happy you are with the status quo. So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.

Well, they're always trotting out those surveys showing that conservatives are happier than liberals, and traditional moms are happier than feminist moms.
Yes, I think if you're not at all bothered by human suffering—hey, it would be great. But if you have a vision of human happiness that includes all those people who are currently suffering, you've got to do something about it.

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Could we consider positive thinking a cause or a symptom of America's seeming resistance to European-style social democracy?
It certainly is related. But positive thinking is not a right-wing plot. I'm glad to hear you say that. One of its chief promoters is Oprah Winfrey, who I suppose we would call a liberal. Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich, was a big admirer of FDR. On the whole though, it tends to be sort of rightwardly-inflected because of this satisfaction with the status quo and the idea that you are who you deserve to be because you could obviously be something else if you wanted. I would've preferred it to be a right-wing plot. Certainly the Templeton Foundation, which has been a major funder of positive psychology, is very right-wing.

I was fascinated by that connection you drew in the book—from Norman Vincent Peale to Templeton to Martin Seligman and company. So it's almost a plot. Can you summarize for us the attitude that got you through the experience of breast cancer in lieu of positive thinking?
Rage! I had a very bad attitude. It seemed totally unfair and out of the blue. I had no risk factors. Where did this come from? And the fact that the treatments are still so barbaric—I think that's the only word I can apply to chemotherapy. It was a very bad time in my life, and the only time, I think, in my adult life when I've crossed off days on a calendar. So I was angry about the disease, and angry about the treatments. I know enough biology to know how wacko chemotherapy is. And then, when I started getting into the literature and the web sites and everything, I was just seething with rage—I couldn't believe all this stuff about being positive.

Maybe anger is an underrated emotion in terms of dealing with adversity.
I describe in the book getting into a back and forth with some women on a breast-cancer web site. They were all so upset about my anger. I think I actually wrote back to one of them asking, have you read the Old Testament? It's full of righteous anger. But anyway, righteous anger is not an acceptable emotion.

Has nobody written the righteous-anger-response-to-breast-cancer book?
No, but a version of my book's first chapter was published in Harper's magazine, and I got such good responses. I was bracing myself to be burned as a witch, but so many women wrote to say, "Thank God somebody said it!"

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Isn't one of the problems with positive thinking that it sells? It's a proven seller and people seem to want the message that it's purveying.
It's a great thing to sell because when it doesn't work, you can always say you didn't try hard enough. I mean, what a thing to sell—you can have anything you want if you follow my plan for how you should change your thoughts and how you can discipline your thoughts. And when you come back and say, "Well, nothing happened, I'm still a laid-off schlump," I can say you didn't try—do it again, start again, here are some more DVDs for you to listen to. A lot of my academic friends always try to look for some economic explanation for why it's popular at some times and not at others. But it's not connected to the business cycle. It's just something that's profitable. Every few years it can be the big news. You can have anything, you can be completely healthy, you can find the man of your dreams by adjusting your thoughts. It's great news!

Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images (left); Sigrid Estrada (right)

It appeals to a kind of infantile notion of our relation to the world—wish, and it shall be so. It speaks to our inner child.
Very infantile. The flip side is that it's ultimately very lonely. You're not saying, "I have a problem, you have a similar problem, let's get together and see what we can do about the situation," but you're having to constantly turn inwards and edit and revise your thoughts all the time. I can't imagine doing that.

It resonates with the whole rugged individualism ethic in American life. The whole trick is figuring out how to repackage the message in a new box.
It's kind of amazing that The Secret was such a huge best-seller, because all of that had been around so much.

It's also just about the most appalling, baldly ridiculous version that's ever been created.
It's not even a book that's written—it's a collection of quotes from motivational speakers and coaches.

You told an interviewer at the end of the Reagan era that there had been no Big Chill for you—that the older you got, the more radical you felt. Can you give us an update on the temperature of your worldview?
The research I've been doing in the last few months, which is about what's happening to those who were already poor in this recession—I don't think writing is even a sufficient outlet for how angry I am about what's happened to so many people.

It looks like welfare reform is finally coming unraveled. We're finding economic straits that are revealing how horrible the so-called reform was. Do you see any indication that we're going to significantly improve the situation, policy-wise?
Will there be a change? I don't know. I've talked to some academic experts who say we can't go backwards, can't demand the old way. But if you can't, then you're faced with the fact that if things continue the way they are, the government will have to generate jobs for people. It was done in the '30s. And the second problem is that some people can't take those jobs because they are already working or taking care of small children or taking care of other members of their family who need care, and how will they provide for them? Not all of us are shovel-ready.

Can you believe we're still trying to fix health-care policy in this country?
Talk about a reason for negative thinking. I was at a reunion a few weeks ago with people I had worked with at one point, a think-tank about health care they had started in '68 or '69. It's gone backwards, it's awful. I would actually even employ the doctrine of positive thinking here. They say we have a three-trillion dollar health-insurance industry—we can't change that. As I asked in This Land Is Their Land, since when is something too big? When have we not been able to take on enemies? Just do it. Pretend it's Saddam Hussein, for Christ's sake!

How come you haven't written a health policy book, given your background in the field?
Nothing was happening. Nothing was changing. I also don't think I'm really a policy person. That's a different thing.